


The Last Light, AKA Jamie Bennett

by theappleppielifestyle



Series: Jamie's Journey [2]
Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Jamie becomes a guardian, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-14
Updated: 2013-01-14
Packaged: 2017-11-25 11:45:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/638564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theappleppielifestyle/pseuds/theappleppielifestyle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>And Jamie could live like this, live in the sound of this- everyone laughing and screaming, the crush of snow pressed into his knees and against his cheek and it’s not like last time, none of them are like they were last time, but right now they have snow in summertime and Jamie’s never loved like this, like it’s going to burst through, like it’s enough to melt the ice.</em>
</p>
<p>This is a story about the same people all over again, just with more mileage. Something big and bad is coming, and the Man in the Moon tells the Guardians they need Jamie. And the kids in the neighbourhood have all grown up, but that doesn't mean they don't believe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Last Light, AKA Jamie Bennett

It’s the same people all over again, just with more mileage.

It starts just like it did last time: all over the neighbourhood, the kids that have turned into the Not-So-Kids wake up from a clutch of frost melting in their eyelashes, and there are specks of ice on their pyjamas and it’s snowing, it’s _snowing_ in their _rooms_ , and Jamie remembers the wonderful burst of disbelief in his own laugh.

Eight years old and his laugh had the same light to it, the same light that made Jack look at him with something like surprise and a warmth that by all means Jack Frost shouldn’t be able to look at anyone with; it should melt out of his eyes, drizzle hotly down his cheeks, drip in scalding silver from his chin.

Eight years old and big brown eyes, eight years old and looking up at him, eight years old and there’s snow in his room and Jack is flying him out of the window.

Ten years and he’s eighteen; eighteen with big brown eyes and having to look slightly down to meet Jack’s gaze. Eight years old and there’s snow in his room, just a bit of it, a few flecks, and Jack is flying him out the window and his hand is smaller than Jamie remembers; his fingers thinner than Jamie’s this time.

_Do you want to become a guardian_ , Jack had asked, and Jamie hadn’t even hesitated.

Eighteen years old and Jamie’s mouth is tingling with it, with the laugh, with Jack’s own pushing against it.

 

 

 

Cupcake comes out of her house with one sleeve of her jacket on, breathing hard, her hair lopsided over her eyes, and she’s the first one to grin out of her and Jamie.

“Hi,” Cupcake says, looking just like she did at eight years old, ten whole years ago, an entire decade and more than half of both of their lives, Jesus _Christ_. “What, you only just found the time to drop by?”

Jamie feels Jack shrug from where their shoulders are pressing together, and Jack’s mouth tugs to the side. “Oops?”

Cupcake rolls her eyes, but the force of it is lost by how hard her mouth is stretching.

There’s a fluttering from inside her pocket, and then Babytooth is budging out, darting forwards and clicking her beak and one time in sixth grade Jamie had the choice to do a diorama on any bird he wanted and he chose a hummingbird. It had been shitty and he had glued two of his fingers together but after a few interventions from his parents he had ended up holding up the makeshift hummingbird for his final project; the wrong shade of green and eerily still and it had made something set in the back of Jamie’s throat, and Babytooth is nudging at his chin, squeaking at him.

Jack says, “Hey, Babytooth,” and her loud answering chirp is more angry than anything. Jack holds up his hands, palm out, still with that shit-eating grin, and says, “Whoa, hey,” as Babytooth zips around his head, chittering hotly.

Jack holds up his hands, elbows pointing out, mock-scared, and Babytooth pecks at him.

“I’m sorry I didn’t visit,” Jack laughs, and then tries to rearrange his tone into something more serious when Babytooth puts a bit more effort into her stabbing beak. “I’m sorry! I was _busy_ , you know I was, I’d visit if I could, you know I need to see the sheen of your artfully plucked feathers or I go into Babytooth withdrawal.”

Babytooth lets loose something akin to a snort, beeps at him and then hovers next to his shoulder with an expression that Jamie usually only sees when he’s forced to keep her in his pocket for over four hours.

Then Cupcake and Jack are both looking at him along with Babytooth, and Jamie realizes that he’s talking. “I had to keep her in my jacket pocket for five and a half hours when I was doing my Bio exam. Three hours in, she started pecking my bellybutton. She nearly gouged my eyes out when they finally let me out of the hall; I had to tell my parents that Cupcake got drunk and used my face as a dartboard. Now they both look at her weird.”

Jack’s laughing by the time he’s halfway through, and Cupcake is still grinning, and even though Babytooth still looks like she’s leaning towards homicidal tendencies, she’s smiling a bit.

Jamie watches them- Jack and Cupcake and Babytooth, three of the things he loves most in the world whether they’ve been there or not, and there’s no ice in the world that wouldn’t melt at the feeling that’s making its way up his chest.

 

 

 

Jamie feels the heavy push of nostalgia along with deja-vu, and a plain old ache for everything that’s happened between the last time he threw a snowball at Eleanor’s window.

It hits the glass and leaves a mark; a handful of snow that is scraped off by the curtains when Eleanor opens the window and looks out.

Eleanor, his maybe-friend since third grade, who is three months older than him with a shaved head and a cheap engagement ring from Kenny four blocks over, looks out the window with something like disbelief and something like the same ache that’s eating Jamie from the inside-out.

She looks down at him standing on the sidewalk with Cupcake on one side and Jack on the other; Babytooth fluttering between all of them. A smile ticks at her lips, once, twice, and Jamie has to tell himself again that through it all, he wasn’t the only one missing them. Missing _it_. Missing whatever the hell they all had before you got laughed out of the cafeteria for believing in Santa.

She looks tired. They’ve all been looking tired lately, but at least she’s been laughing more lately since finals ended.

She runs a hand down over her mouth, pulling at the skin of her chin so it drags. “Is…?”

Jamie says, “Yes,” and a few houses down, he hears Marcus and Brian whooping, and across from them, Lenny is zipping up his coat, fumbling with the buttons that go over the top.

And Jack is standing next to him, his cold hand brushing Jamie’s wrist. The streetlights are actually on; even the one that hasn’t worked ever since Pitch smashed it. It’s mid-July and there’s snow scattered in the grass in every yard that Jamie looks across.

None of these things make any sense.

And it’s just like last time, except not at all.

 

 

 

Sophie comes out of the house a few minutes later in a cut-off flannel shirt that ends just above her navel, the one she’s started wearing to bed ever since she broke up with Bobby for the third time, and for a second she just stares.

There’s snow in her hair- her hair, which she still keeps combed over one side, messy as hell no matter how she shoves at it. It’s melting against her scalp, trickling into her ears, and she doesn’t have to blink hard like Marcus did, she just looks right at Jack with parted lips.

She stands there with her breath in one long cloud extending from her mouth, and Jamie watches his little sister, the girl who keeps a toy rabbit stuffed in the depths of her drawer for years after Jamie had thought he had lost it.

She looks and looks and looks, all of fourteen and on the cusp of learning how bad the world can really be sometimes, and her voice shakes as she says, “It’s- snowing.”

Jack shrugs. “Unfortunate side effect of being around me. Or not so unfortunate, y’know, because _snow_ , duh.”

“It’s _snowing_ ,” Sophie repeats, and Jamie knows all the ways she can follow it up: _it’s July, it’s summer, you shouldn’t be real, you were just a dream, this shouldn’t be happening, you were a story and these kinds of things don’t happen out of stories._

Instead, she doesn’t say anything. She looks wordlessly at them for a while, and then, slowly, her eyes slip shut. She tilts her head back.

For a second Jamie doesn’t know what she’s doing, and then she splays her fingers out by her sides, raising her arms.

Jamie watches, one hand in Jack’s and one in Cupcake’s and one is numbingly hot and the other is freezing cold, as his baby sister tilts her head back even further and laughs. She laughs like she’s four and still has dreams of Easter bunnies and can’t count to twenty without stumbling; laughs with her hands held out, catching the snow on her tongue and fingers and through her hair, and laughs and laughs and laughs.

 

 

The same people, just with more mileage, and Marcus is yelling and dragging his twin along behind him, baggy-shirted and falling over each other and getting ice down the turn-ups of their pants when they tug each other down, their voices lighter than Jamie’s heard from them in a long time.

Eleanor screeches gleefully when Babytooth grabs her hat and slides it down over her eyes, and Eleanor is careful not to be too hard when she swats outwards, her fingers not even grazing Babytooth as she zips between her hands.

It’s a cacophony of it, of rusty laughter that hasn’t been faced with this kind of laugh in a long time, and Jack makes sure Jamie never runs out of ammo when he declares a snowball fight, and North’s battle cry is booming when he lobs a snowball in Jamie’s direction. Thanks to years of this, to resorting to just him and Cupcake scraping freezer sludge for the past few years, Jamie manages to dodge it so it smacks into the tree behind him.

Sophie is dangling from Bunny’s back, her arms clinging around his neck, and Bunny is gentle with her as he bounds down the street, over parked cars and up trees and Sophie is yelling the whole time. Half of it is lost due to her gulping laughter, and half of it from burying her face in Bunny’s fur when he makes a particularly daring jump.

Sandman is moving his hands like an orchestra conductor, like he’s playing the piano, like he’s directing the armies where to charge, and strands of bright yellow sand are beaming out in every direction. Jamie catches a glimpse of a sand-jellyfish, swimming through air just before it’s eclipsed from his sight by a building. Sees sand moving in the shape of castles, the yawning doors and archways and staircases reaching to the sky. Sees sting-rays, like last time, cascading through the city and floating on nothing.

Sand streaking like shooting stars, leaving stardust trails behind them everywhere Jamie looks, and Lenny is holding his glasses on with both hands are he and Jamie sled on a trashcan lid along train-tracks of ice that Jack makes with his staff as he flies, whooping and cheering and Jack never lets them fall once.

And Jamie could live like this, live in the sound of this- everyone laughing and screaming, the crush of snow pressed into his knees and against his cheek and it’s not like last time, none of them are like they were last time, but right now they have snow in summertime and Jamie’s never loved like this, like it’s going to burst through, like it’s enough to melt the ice.

 

 

 

When he announces he’s going to become a guardian, the biggest reaction is Cupcake saying, “Only you would consider that a genuine career choice, Jamie.”

There’s a scattering of laughter all around, and everyone’s looking him with a mixture of sad-happy-accepting-sombre, and Jamie opens his mouth to ask before Sophie answers it for him.

“We all knew you were the one holding into it the hardest,” says his baby sister, her hair dripping wet from how much snow is through it, “but I think we all knew that it wasn’t… over. For you, I mean.”

She swallows, and she’s shivering, and so is everyone, but no-one can really be bothered to do anything about it. “But the day before college? Even for you, that’s cutting it close,” she says, and laughs, but it’s not as real as the last few ones.

“Something’s up, apparently,” Jamie says, and he’s sort of shivering from standing too close to Jack (and even there, there are multiple reasons), sort of shivering from the snow that’s currently melting down his shirt and sort of shivering from the knowledge that the thing he’s been waiting for is finally happening, even if it did take longer than he thought it would.

Eleanor pushes the hair out of her face, easing it so strands don’t come out in her hands. “Like what?”

North says, “We are not sure yet,” in that accent that Jamie learned to place the year he turned eleven. “We are figuring out soon, but it will take time. But Man in Moon,” he says, and then his meaty hand is pushing down on Jamie’s shoulder, “tells us to make Jamie guardian, so we do.”

Marcus rolls his eyes, and Jamie’s going to miss him, going to miss his stupid video games and how he used to swear at the screen every time he played them without fail. “Ohhh, well if the Man in the Moon says so, then sure. You get winter wonderland and we get to be freshmen in college. Ugh, can I be a guardian, too?”

“Just him at the moment,” Jack says, and Jamie can feel the warm-cold of his hand pushing against his. “But hey, maybe we can start taking applications?”

“No,” North says flatly. “Nice try, Jack.”

Jack sighs dramatically in Marcus’s direction. “Sorry, man. I did all I could.”

“Just,” Jamie says. “Just, tell my parents I freaked out about college and took an impromptu road trip or something?”

It’s not going to last forever, he knows. There are problems in his formula, there are knots in the solution, and he has no idea what’s going to happen and he’s shaking and he’s standing under a broken streetlight in the neighbourhood that he grew up in with the kids he grew up with, plus a few extra.

Lenny says, “We’ll cover for you man,” red-cheeked with his red glasses falling down his cherry red nose, and his freckles stand out in the snow. “I can even hack your Facebook and update your statuses about it. Wait, do they have wifi in the North Pole?”

“Shut up, Lenny.” Sophia shoves him, but it’s not hard. “But like he said, we’ll cover for you. Probably with a better story, but we will.”

Jamie nods, suddenly too full to reply, and has to clear his throat before he turns to Cupcake. “You, uh. If you want, I think Babytooth should stay with you for now.”

Babytooth squeaks, her brow furrowing, and Cupcake does the same sort of thing.

Jamie shrugs. “I think you’ll need her. All of you. To have something to prove it at the end of the day.”

“You never needed anything to prove it,” Cupcake says, and Babytooth is fluttering uncertainly next to her shoulder, and Jamie thinks of his sixth-grade hummingbird project and aches.

“I did,” Jamie says, and knows it’s true, his fingers curling around Jack’s almost unconsciously. “Everyone does, every now and again. I just… held on longer than everyone else, I guess.”

He’s still holding on, and Jack’s fingers are just as cold as they always were when he touches them.

Cupcake says, “I guess,” and this time, her smile is less sad. “Come back more than Jack did, okay?”

Jack says, “Hey, I resent that,” but it’s gentle and makes it easier for Jamie to slip in.

“I’ll visit,” Jamie says, and his breath is still cold steam in front of him. He wets his lips and they dry almost instantly. “I promise. I’ll come back whenever I can.”

They all hug him, one by one, squeezing tight, and Jamie lets everything they’ve done wash over him with every pair of arms that circle around his waist.

Jack’s hand presses softly into the small of Jamie’s back after Cupcake steps away, the last one to hug him and smiling the saddest. “You ready?”

Jamie can’t think of anything else to say but, “Yeah,” and nodding jerkily, because he’s been waiting for this ever since that first taste of snow, since that first crackle of wrapping paper, the first tooth he ever lost.

Then North is taking out a snowglobe from his coat, and Sophie’s smile is blazing, and the glass breaks against the concrete before a swirl of colour bursts into a circle in front of them.

Jamie looks back for a long few seconds, and no-one calls him out on it because he has more than enough reason to.

He says, “Good luck with college,” and Cupcake says, “Good luck with being a guardian,” and everyone looks at each other like this is the craziest, luckiest thing to ever happen, and then Jamie’s stepping into the portal and Jack’s hand is still on his back, and the neighbourhood slips out of view right in front of his eyes.

 

 

 

Jack, apparently, doesn’t have a home at the moment. Or a headquarters, whatever they call it, but instead he just flits around, Babytooth-style, and takes whatever he can get.

Honestly, it sounds lonely to Jamie, but Jack assures him it’s not all bad.

“You meet the most interesting people,” Jack says teasingly, and Jamie grins.

One by one- dreams, hopes, fun, wonder- they show him their world, and every time, Jamie feels like there’s another thing clicking into place.

For a while, they just drift. Jamie gets shown the ropes, meets a few thousand siblings of Babytooth, narrowly misses getting sat on by a yeti and all in all finds the elves to be all kinds of adorable, even if North glares at them sometimes.

Sometimes, Jamie catches Jack looking at him like if he touches him, he’ll melt, and whenever Jamie sees it, he kisses it right off his face.

 

 

 

The vow comes easily off his tongue, and Jamie doesn’t know if he’s supposed to pretend not to notice Tooth crying off to the side or not.

North says, “Will you, Jamie Bennett, vow to watch over the children of the world,” and Jamie feels it click into place, click, click, click.

“To guard them with your life, their hopes, their wishes and dreams, for they are all that we have, all that we are, and all that we will ever be.”

And Jamie remembers Jack hearing these words directed at him, remembers how he had looked back at Jamie, and the loose, sloppy smile that Jamie had beamed back at him.

He remembers how unwaveringly certain Jack had looked after that, and Jamie looks over at Jack, who is standing left of Sandy.

Jack starts when Jamie catches his eye, but then he’s smiling, starting off unsure before gathering momentum, and it’s not Jamie’s smile he had done when he was eight, but it’s pure Jack: pulling up at the sides, soft and bright illogically _warm_ for someone who freezes things to the touch.

Jamie feels just like he did when he was watching everyone riding the sand creatures, sprawling out in the snow, laughing easily and loudly.

Jamie says, “I will,” looking right at Jack, basking in the warmth of it before there’s an actual, literal warmth starting in the pit of his chest, and then working its way outwards.

Then it’s _bright_ ; light spilling down out of his mouth and his eyelashes are casting shadows and so are his fingers and there’s so much light it’s like he’s standing at the centre of his own personal sun, and it burns blindingly for a few seconds before fading out, until it’s dissipated entirely except for the height of it in his chest.

When he looks up, everyone’s wearing some variation of a smile.

North is outright beaming.

“Congratulations,” he says. “You are now guardian.”

 

 

 

Nothing’s changed, physically. When he looks at himself in the mirror that night, he’s still just Jamie Bennett, same slim shoulders and freckles and skinny ankles.

But then Bunny trails off in the middle of a conversation the next day and when Jamie looks over to see why he stopped, Bunny is far down below him as he says, “Uh, you’re floating, mate.”

Jamie Bennett, who has only ever won one award in his life and that was a spelling bee and it was by default via the competition getting a sudden bout of stage fright and vomiting all over the first row, flies a few shaky circles around the ceiling before crashing into Phil the Yeti and nearly getting decapitated by a ceiling fan. Because Santa’s workshop has ceiling fans, and hey, who knew?

Bunny laughs at him until it’s dissolved down into tiny bunny-like squeaks, and Jamie can’t do anything but laugh along with him, because he can _fly_.

When they ask him about his centre- _no pressure_ , Jack says, _it took me a while to find mine_ , Jamie says he doesn’t know what his is right now.

“It’s cool,” Jack says. “You don’t have to figure it out right now. I mean, unless the fate of the world depends on it. In that case, you should probably get on it.”

Jamie huffs a laugh under his breath. “Thanks, that’s helpful.”

Jack’s sentence is muffled from his bite into an apple as he leans backwards, one leg dangling off the stair they’re lying on. “’S what I live for.”

Jamie pushes him at that, a soft nudge, and Jack yelps and pretends to fall off, because he’s still Jack Frost and Jamie wouldn’t love him like he does if he didn’t do things like this.

Whenever Jamie touches Jack since the transformation, he doesn’t feel cold against him anymore.

 

 

 

“It’s not that hard, mate.”

“Bullshit, Bunny, how long did it take _you_ to find your centre?”

Bunny make a motion with his paw that looks suspiciously like he’s flipping Jack off before he says, “I knew before I even _became_ a guardian. Top that, Mr Three-Hundred-Years.”

Jack mutters something, and then turns sideways to look at Jamie. “Ignore him, he’s a bastard.”

“Oi.”

“Don’t interrupt, I’m doing important training things,” Jack says, not looking at Bunny. “Jamie, it’s fine. Finding your centre takes a while, even if it’s right in front of you. Like, mine’s-”

Bunny says, “Teenage angst,” loud enough that North looks up from where he’s carving a face into a doll.

“Go screw yourself, kangaroo,” Jack tells him, and Bunny snorts.

 

 

 

A month into becoming a guardian, Jack starts to take Jamie flying.

It’s harder than it looks- Jack laughs every time Jamie crashes, but it’s obvious he’s trying hard not to. Except that time Jamie flew face-first into a fish market, scattering salmon everywhere, but that time Jamie didn’t blame him.

There’s something freeing about it, obviously- of course there is, it’s _flying_ , everything that Jamie’s ever associated with being free has had some form of wings, corporal or not. But there’s something about increasing his speed until he’s a blur, until the woods or the snow or the skyscrapers, whatever, is a blur around him, and the only thing he can see clearly is Jack beside him, letting his whoop get lost in the air as the wind drags past.

And there are benefits to not being widely believed in, because during the flying lessons, both Jack and Jamie can streak through New York and sit on the tips of the statue of liberty’s crown without getting yelled at by anyone, even if Jamie spends the entire first time glancing nervously over his shoulder in case someone notices. Like, say, a policeman.

One day, after Jamie’s realized that his fear of heights has all but vanished, he asks, “Why me?”

Jack looks up, ice-cream halting on its way to his mouth. “Why you what?”

“Why did the Man in the Moon choose me?”

“Oh,” Jack says. He shrugs. “Uh, we don’t know? We don’t exactly get to ask.”

Jamie just waits, because there’s more, there’s got to be, and after a few seconds Jack shrugs again.

“You were the last light,” he says. “That’s kind of a big deal.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Jamie knows already, in some distant kind of way. He realizes that being the single, _last_ kid to believe obviously has some kind of toll along with it, he’s just never thought about it: he was the only light to not go out, and now it probably never will.

He smiles at that, and knows, suddenly, why it was him.

Somewhere, in the depths of his chest, between the caves of his ribs, he knows it’s always been there: his centre; belief, bright and blazing, that one firefly-pinprick of light sometimes flickering but never dying entirely.

He doesn’t tell Jack, not yet- he sits there and drinks in the last few rays of the sun and watches it hit Jack’s perpetually pale skin, and would take this over anything else in the world: life as a guardian, with Jack at his side and everyone else where he can find them when he goes looking.

 

 

 

True to his word, Jamie visits over the years.

He spends a few nights with Cupcake through both freshman and sophomore year, going for flies with Babytooth and stopping by a few children’s bedrooms along the way, making sure they’re grinning hugely before soaring away, back to Cupcake’s dorm. She’s studying to be a lawyer- _we can’t all be guardians_ , she tells him, _but I’m going to help in any way I can._

Sophie rolls her eyes most of the time when she comes home from school to find him perched on her bed, reading his old comic books, but kisses his forehead every time he says he has to leave. She keeps getting taller every time he sees her.

He checks up on everyone else, leaves a note for his parents and makes sure Babytooth is tucked in before he leaves them all and flies back up to the Pole, where everyone is waiting for a meeting.

There’s something coming, like they’ve all known for a while. They don’t know what it is, but it’s big and it’s new and they’re going to need Jamie.

And, well, until then, Jamie’s going to go on flying lessons and kiss Jack lazily and train with Bunny and make things with Sandy, and he’ll take everything else as it comes.


End file.
